Many companies and various entities use folding, extractable or three-dimensional paper products to display pictures or graphic contents as part of advertising campaigns, marketing, and sales promotion activities. Over the years, a demand has arisen for such paper products with interesting and intricate designs. The present patent application refers to and describes an apparatus for displaying graphic contents that has an innovative and interesting design which is combined with additional advantageous as discloses hereinafter and in the application.
It is customary to produce and manufacture paper products in a variety of shapes and designs for purposes of advertising, marketing, sales promotion, and so on. Such paper products include books, pamphlets, greeting cards, event invitations, and so on and are made of cut and/or folded paper. They are designed so as to create special effects and various animations that form when the product is opened or activated. In other words, opening or activating the product creates an effect of shifting, jumping, rotation, or movement in parts of the product.
Products of this kind will be referred to here as “animated papers”. Animated papers are manufactured from paper that has undergone a process of cutting or perforation (hereinafter referred to as “cutting”) and sometimes also folding. The term “paper” in the aforementioned context refers to any kind of paper, of any thickness, including cardboard and so on.                As mentioned, animated paper undergoes a cutting process, at the end of which the paper has fold lines and cut lines. A cut line means that during the creation of the final product from the paper, it is cut along the cut line.        Similarly, a fold line means that during the creation of the final product from the paper, it is folded along the fold line. Nowadays, it is customary to create fold and cut lines by means of perforation or by partially cutting the thickness of the paper. The term perforation refers to a known technology whereby a (cut or fold) line is created by making a series of fine pinholes that enable the user to fold or cut the paper in a fast manner. Paper may also be prepared for folding or cutting by cutting it with a very thin, sharp knife so that the cut goes only partially through the thickness of the paper (otherwise the paper will be cut immediately). To describe the problem that the present invention solves, imagine a standard animated paper (5) with a conventional fold line (51) and a print (52) that extends over said fold line, as depicted in FIG. 2. FIG. 3 depicts the standard animated paper (5) from FIG. 2 after it is folded along the fold line (51).        
As is evident from the drawing, after the paper (5) is folded along the fold line (51), the inner part of the paper (the thickness of the paper, denoted 53) along the fold line (51) is white (or any other original color of the paper) and as a result, the print (52) on the paper is not continuous. This problem has led manufacturers to print only on areas of animated paper that do not include fold lines. Thus, for instance, U.S. Patent Application No. U.S. 2014/0069994, which refers to animated paper, emphasizes that printing should not be done on the fold lines, but rather only on areas of the paper that do not include such lines.
Furthermore, when the printed design appears on the back side of the paper rather than on the side with the fold line, and the user tries to fold the paper from the other side of the fold line, the paper simply “bursts”. The present invention offers a good and effective solution to this problem by providing a method of creating fold lines that enable aesthetic folding of the paper as well as the possibility of printing graphics over the fold lines themselves.
Animated papers are manufactured primarily using offset printing machines and the manufacture process of such products includes, in general, the following components and stages: Stage I: A specific model of the animated paper is selected from a variety of models, or a new model is developed. Stage II: A graphic artist or the client prepares the appropriate graphics for the selected model. Stage III: A special die is manufactured so that the paper may be cut according to the template of the selected model, which indicates the location of the cuts, folds, and perforations, as well as the borders of the printed paper. Stage IV: Paper is purchased to serve as raw material for the manufacture of the product. Stage V: The graphics are printed onto the paper using an offset printing machine. Stage VI: The printed paper is transferred to the cutting machine, which uses the die to cut the paper. Stage VII: The paper is manipulated and folded, and the pieces are joined and pasted to obtain the final product.
Note that all of the Stage VII operations are performed manually (hereinafter “the manual assembly”). Stage VIII: The finished product is delivered to the client. Stage IX: Quality control is performed on each of the aforementioned stages. This stage is performed in parallel and in overlapping with all of the other stages, since each and every stage requires quality control. The quality control performed on each of the stages renders the production of animated papers expensive, since the process includes irregular graphics, printing, and cutting, as well as manual assembly.
The stages described above are relatively complex, complicated and expensive. Thus, for instance, the printing house must verify that the selected graphics are appropriate and accurate since due to the fact that the product is a folded animated paper, some parts of the paper are supposed to face up while should others face down. Cutting must be executed and printing plates must be prepared for the graphics. It is, therefore, customary to execute the printing part of the manufacture process using offset printing. Indeed, the manufacture process of animation papers includes multiple stations, verifications, and preparation of components for manufacture. As a result, it is an expensive process and clients who order relatively few units of a specific model are required to pay a relatively high price per unit.
Thus, a large group of potential users who require only several dozen units of a certain model is excluded from the market. The present invention offers a solution to the problem described above and it refers to a system and process for the manufacture of animated papers using digital printing that is more efficient and less expensive for the client than currently existing systems and methods.